My urban idol 2050 - the city of Gothenburg

In this paper, the author sketches a scenario for a possible future development path for the City of Gothenburg and its surrounding labour market region - the Gothenburg region and a scenario for what the city and the region might look like in 2050. The author does not use a traditional scenario technique containing several different scenarios based upon rather extreme assumptions for a number of central variables. Instead, the author presents one scenario for the development path and one scenario for the year 2050 based upon: 1) information about the city and the region that he has collected from various sources; 2) ideas found in the literature in the field; 3) ideas developed by the SWECO team during the RiverCity workshop in Gothenburg in June 2011. Certainly, nobody knows what the future will bring but the author hopes that his contribution will stimulate thinking and discussions about urban development in general and in particular in the City of Gothenburg and the Gothenburg region.